Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Thaal Hvark-Fetel is the Time Spider and Mayhem Spinner. The threads of his web are panic and anxiety-with his gibbering abdomen and poisonous gaze, he has been at the center of chaos since thinking began.

Friday, September 22, 2017

The Ziz, according to Hebrew lore, is the Father of all Birds. The Ziz is so huge that one flap of its wing blots out the sun. The bottom image illustrates the larval form of the Ziz- it begins life as a sort of land-dwelling fish.

Designs inspired by George MacDonald's Princess and the Goblin (1872). This book has some of the most evocative creature descriptions I've ever read, when describing the animals that the goblins of the story keep. Truly crazy stuff. The idea is that the goblins themselves were once human beings who, due to some disagreement with their human king of long ago, began living underground, and then began to devolve over many generations. The livestock and occasional wild animal they brought with them to live below also began to physically unravel through the unnatural underground conditions, and mix among themselves (not to mention the goblins), to the point where one could not tell what original creature each being descended from, and that their shapes were more akin to outlandishly grotesque, living versions of children's drawings than to anything the natural world could produce. Incidentally, the book is available to read free online, and the chapter concerning these monstrosities is called "The Cob's Creatures". Interesting to note is that, while the Princess and the Goblin is meant as a religious allegory (I believe it actually predates the Narnia books), MacDonald introduced some rudimentary notions of natural selection/evolution as the concept behind his insane goblin beasts.

Thursday, September 14, 2017

Sunday, August 20, 2017

I've been working on a lot of stuff that I have been holding on to for some time. Two of these are from 2014, however the Goblin Market inspired wombat creature is from last year. I hope someday to illustrate the entirety of Ms. Rossetti's poem.